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Social Networking

May 10, 2013

The question is no longer whether your company should be involved
with social media — it already is, whether you're leading or following.
The skyrocketing popularity of these services is undeniable and the
potential reward — for engaging, expanding and strengthening
relationships with your key communities — is enormous. So are the risks.
Risks come in many forms, and the prudent organization will assess its
specific situation and take appropriate preventive steps to manage both
risks created by others as well as risk created internally. Social media
is a shockingly effective catalyst for both.

The key is
understanding the nature of this new medium. The company and its counsel
must be familiar not only with the rules, but with the culture of the
online community. Social media is not just a new way to disseminate your
message; it's a conversation taking place on a massively multi-person
scale, worldwide. But just like any face-to-face conversation, it must
be a two-way process (albeit on a massively multi-person scale) or it
dies.

Here are the most frequent areas where companies can get in
trouble, as well as some ideas for how to stay on the right side of the
risk/reward curve.

April 22, 2013

Noyo Food Forest is a non-profit organization in Fort Bragg, California doing amazing work for their community. They are currently trying to raise money to build a special accessible garden to be used by all community member but with raised beds at wheelchair and standing height for elders and disabled. They believe that growing organic food should be accessible to everyone.

Please go visit their Kickstarter page to see their extraordinary vision. For more information, visit Noyo Food Forest's main page.

April 21, 2013

Google
on Wednesday became one of the first major Internet companies to put
control of data after death directly into the hands of its users.

The Internet giant unveiled
a dashboard for users of its Gmail, Google+, cloud storage Drive,
Picasa albums, YouTube and other services that lets people identify what
they’d like to happen to their data after they pass away or become
inactive for an extended period of time. You can choose to delete some
or all of the data after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity, or
pass data from the accounts along to one or more other people.

Call them your Google heirs. Google, for the record, calls the offering its “Inactive Account Manager.”

April 18, 2013

Older adults hit a digital milestone
last year: For the first time since the Pew Research Center’s Internet
and American Life Project began conducting surveys, a majority (53
percent) of people over age 65 used the Internet. The proportion has
since inched upward, to 54 percent.

Which certainly represents progress. When Pew first began tracking
Internet use in 2000, only 13 percent of seniors were online. But it
remains a fairly anemic number compared to the rest of the adult
population, more than 80 percent of whom use the Internet.

And among the older old, those over age 77, only about a third are online.
Yet that’s the cohort most likely to become isolated by physical
limitations, poor transportation and the loss of social connections —
the group, in other words, who might particularly benefit from being
able to interact with the world digitally, for everything from banking
and ordering groceries to e-mailing faraway friends.

April 10, 2013

Have you ever wondered what will happen to your Facebook account or
other digital assets if you become disabled or when you die? Are there
some personal profiles or digital profiles to which you want to LIMIT
access?? Then, this presentation and materials are for you.

April 05, 2013

Social media is a great tool
for communicating with clients, but it can also have a secondary benefit
for your practice by boosting your website's search ranking.

The way most clients will find you is by searching on the Internet
for a lawyer. Hopefully they'll narrow their search by area of law and
location, but even then there are lots of competitors out there. Having a professional and informational website can be a great way to get clients, but it doesn't work if no one sees it.

Getting a professional consultant
to manage your website's search engine optimization can be a valuable
way to improve your rankings. But you can also help yourself by stepping
up your social media presence.

To prove that claim, we have some insight into how Google and other search engines rank web pages.

March 13, 2013

A grieving Oregon mother who battled Facebook for full access to her
deceased son's account has been pushing for years for something that
would prevent others from losing photos, messages and other memories —
as she did.

"Everybody's going to face this kind of a situation
at some point in their lives," says Karen Williams, whose 22-year-old
son died in a 2005 motorcycle accident.

The Oregon Legislature
responded and took up the cause recently with a proposal that would have
made it easier for loved ones to access the "digital assets" of the
deceased, only to be turned back by pressure from the tech industry,
which argued that both a 1986 federal law and voluntary terms of service
agreements prohibit companies from sharing a person's information —
even if such a request were included in a last will and testament.